The Train to Long Island

It is New Year's Eve, 1995. I am on the Long Island Railroad headed east, to spend the weekend at my sister's place. I don't remember the name of her station. Martha knows. She will tell me when it is time to get off. Looking out the window. Back yards, warehouses, storage yards, litter. Police parked in out-of-the-way places, taking a break, or on stake-out at empty Little League fields. Probably waiting to apprehend dog poopers... actually, their owners who don't clean up after them. I think about calling COP-TIPS and snitching on Zig. He likes to walk his dogs on the perimeter of the ballfield in his town. He says his dogs enjoy it. And the grass is tall, so the stuff basically disappears as far as he is concerned. Zig isn't concerned about children stepping in it and he sees cleaning up after your dog as a left-wing, city thing. Gettin' busted would be good for him. He's amusing when fired up about the oppressive forces of government conspiring to limit individual freedoms - like his dog being able to poop wherever he wants.

Piles of broken concrete in a lot. Zooming through a station without stopping. More backyards, a lumberyard, electric (transformer?) company sites surrounded by chain link fences, water towers. I like water towers. I think of Tim, of our walks together, and the jokes I would make about water towers.

My nephew Tim had Muscular Dystrophy and viewed the world around him from his seat in a wheel chair. Every few weeks, when he was a teenager, I would visit him and take him out for long walks around his neighborhood in Queens, New York. Tim had a couple of passions. He loved cars. Fancy cars. Sleek sports cars. And Tim loved to draw. Fancy, sleek sports cars with loads of detail and decoration were his specialty. In fact, I can't recall him drawing much else.

The cars were perfect. Dream cars. And always empty.

I decided somewhere along the line, that it would be good for him (maybe open him up a bit) if he got some people in those cars. His resistance was total. It was the sleek, powerful machine that he was interested in. Wandering the neighborhood, he would light up and chatter non-stop when he spotted a nice set of wheels. I enjoyed jerking his chain a little about his obsession and would make-believe we were careening out of control and going to bang into the object of his devotion, and put a dent in it. Tim couldn't stand the idea of a beautiful car getting scratched up.

My other routine was to wax enthusiastic about water towers whenever we would see one. "How beautiful. How stately and majestic! Tim, you're not really looking. Can't you see how great it is? How can a hunk of metal sitting at a curb compare to this regal giant?" I would go on in this vein for blocks. I actually do think water towers are pretty cool, and what's even better, weird. But mostly, I talked them up because it drove Tim nuts. "Patchogue is next!"

Patchogue, I know, is somewhere on Long Island. An area once owned, no doubt, by the Patchogue tribe, or named after Chief Patchogue, or perhaps dreamed up by some white guy to impress his friends back in King George's Londontown. I understand there is at least one Indian reservation on Long Island but I've never seen it.

I decide to read for a while... about computers, 3D rendering programs, cross-platform problems and upgrades. Most of this I find barely comprehensible. "Meanwhile, there are other emerging open standards for software developers to write to instead of developing propriety engines. Intel's 3-D Render (3-DR) graphics system programming interface offers a set of rendering-level primitives and attributes, and handles communications with lower-level Windows drivers like GDI-DDI, DCI and Microsoft's emerging Open GL-based 3D-DDI." Huh? Maybe I'll get it next year.

The guy behind me is large and round. He was snoring earlier, but now has settled into a comfortable, rhytmical, very audible breathing. He's slumped into the corner of his seat, up against the window. His left arm has been extended for the entire trip, bracing himself against the window frame, his head sunk down into his jacket. A very blissful traveler by any account.

"Mastic Shirley, next!"

Martha says, "That's us."

Pulling my bag down from the overhead rack, I wonder if the town shouldn't be called Shirley Mastic, or maybe Ms Mastic, or even Ms Shirley. I'm glad it isn't my job to name towns. There is, obviously, more to it than meets the eye.